Teen Ellen Foster returns with wit, wisdom

January 22, 2006

Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons' first novel, published almost 20 years ago, opened with this painfully matter-of-fact declaration: "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy." Gibbons was celebrated for capturing, and sustaining, her 11-year-old title character's voice, which guarded and revealed a brutalized but fiercely resilient spirit. By the novel's end, when Ellen took a long walk on a cold Christmas Day to secure some measure of safety for herself, readers knew exactly how much unearned sorrow had come to this child, how little compassion or joy, and how determined she was to do more with her life than merely survive.

In Gibbons' eighth novel, The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, Ellen once again tells her story. Readers captivated by the first book may be relieved that Gibbons hasn't allowed her hero to skip over adolescence. Ellen is just 15 in the new novel, set in 1974; she is still living in the foster home she claimed for her own, "thus my name Ellen Foster."

One of the dozens of tests administered by the foster-care system has placed her IQ "up in the range where people are prone to losing their ration and nursing along gibberish plots to overthrow the government" In this novel's opening, Ellen is fantasizing not about murder but about quality higher education. In a vintage blend of sincerity, inexperience and calculation, she writes Harvard University President Derek Bok, laying out her plans to enroll at Harvard as a young undergraduate instead of "crossing the real and symbolic road" to attend high school in rural North Carolina.

She summarizes her history: an alcoholic, abusive father; a much-loved, and loving, mother who took her own life; disastrous stays with relatives who ignored, or belittled, or actively mistreated her; and through it all, "loving school as well as close friends . . . and reading like a fiend."

Bok's answer comes late in the novel, but long before then, it's clear that not even an Ivy League, fairy-tale ending can happen in time to shield Ellen from more pain. What's left to struggle with -- and what must be neutralized somehow -- has less to do with a somewhat contrived plot and more with the corrosive weight of the child's past.

Ellen is helped in finding her measure of peace by her foster mother, Laura, who persists in seeing the girl's presence in her life as a kind of gift.

As in Ellen Foster, the new novel is shaped entirely by its narrative voice: its dense syntax, storytelling fits and starts, Ellen's worrying ideas and memories until they come clear for her, her deadpan humor and tart cultural notes, her rendering of the reality of other characters, conversations and dramatic moments. We know only what Ellen knows, or can stand to know, at any moment, which at some points limits the novel's possibilities. It's hard not to wish, for example, for Laura's point of view at times, since she is not only wise about Ellen but a compelling, complicated character in her own right.

But the novel's method of telling, in which Ellen herself is the story's landscape, is also its signal strength. As she uses her considerable resources to move toward understanding -- and to react, equally, to old losses and sudden good fortune -- we're right there with her.